Venga! Robotic Vacuum Cleaner, with Mop, Easy to Use, 6 Cleaning Modes, Quiet Operation, Black, VG RVC 3000 BK BS

Great little robot for daily use
This robot vacuum is great and it does a decent job. So first of all, be aware that this is not a high end maximum power monster that will rip out embedded or tangled pieces of crud from you carpet – no vacuum will. It cleans the surface and picks up dust and small debris – and I didn’t realise just how much dust was in my house until I had this robot.

So it has a standard and max suction – it doesn’t always switch to max mode (or I can’t tell), but the standard suction is fine for me (mainly thick carpet + some floors).

I set it to auto and off it goes. The pattern seems random and it goes over the same spots several times over, and runs for 1-2 hours. Overall, it covers everywhere. After it’s done, you can see the track marks on the carpet which looks nice. It works even in complete darkness.

Sometimes it gets stuck. It climbs onto ledges up to an inch tall – like my fireplace surround, and I have to put some objects there to block the edge. It also climbs onto the base of my barstool and gets stuck sometimes. Make sure your doors are properly open – if it’s half open, then venga will push the door closed and get trapped in that room. So each night, I tidy up the mess that my kids made, block the fireplace and barstool, and then let the venga clean up the rest! Timer works well too. For upstairs, it has a good cliff detection system but my heart stops when it goes half off the top step so I prefer to block it in any case.

After it’s done, you have to empty and clean the machine. You empty out the dust collecting chamber into the bin which is easy to do. Then you pop open the dust catcher and empty/brush that clean too (it catches a lot of dust). And lastly, you use the cutter (provided) to cut all the hair and threads trapped in the brush roller on the underside of the robot – very important, I can’t believe how much hair it picks up!

First few times I used it, the chamber got completely full up and it left streaks of dust/fluff on my carpets – that’s because my carpets and house were so dusty! Now I use it daily (I alternate between upstairs and downstairs) and it only fill up half each day, and there are no streaks. I am amazed every day that it picks up a load of dust even when I think the carpet is clean. Sometimes I have it fo the carpet twice in a day.

It works better on floors in my opinion.

It is noisy, but not as noisy as a regular vacuum. If I shut my bedroom door at night, I can barely hear it in the background downstairs, but it’s nice hearing it do all the work and knowing you’ll come down to a clean floor. It has a bumper at the front and when it hits an object or wall, the bumper clicks and this is how it knows to change direction (in conjunction with the infrared sensor of course), but it can be a bit noisy when it clicks.

A couple of times, it randomly got stuck or one of the spinning brushes came off, and I don’t know why, but that’s pretty much just a couple of times in 6 months. Once, my kid messed with the robot and the robot went a bit mad, doing the same spot repeatedly. I cleaned the sensors, let the battery drain, recharged it, and it was fine.

Make sure all your cables are well out of the way. Sometimes I’ve found it stuck next to my phone charger – it really does suck up the wires tightly and get jammed, so you have to tidy them before switching venga on.

Now, it does an reasonable jobs of the edges but I still find it necessary to use my regular vacuum with a pipe attachment to clean the edges everywhere, but only now and again. No vacuum can get into those edges anyway. And if you have a bit of fluff or something tangled into the carpet, you have to get those out manually.

It can also get stuck under some furniture if the gap is really tight. After 3 months, I found it stuck under the fridge which had never happened before and I had to lower the height of the fridge (it was on a tilt to make sure the door swings shut after use).

The mop function is mediocre at best. It just wipes water across the floor. It definitely makes the floor cleaner but it doesn’t replace a good scrub, and it leaves a bit too much water for my liking (the floor is too wet to walk ok) – it would be ideal for a hot country in which the floor dried quickly, but not in the UK, so I don’t use the mop function. Also, you need to shut the doors to carpeted rooms – otherwise it will drag the mop over your carpet!

It keeps cleaning until it runs out of battery, and then it slowly finds its way back to the charger. A couple of times it died en route and I found it in some random place.

It takes about two hours to charge. I wish it came with two chargers so I could leave one charging base upstairs and one downstairs.

For me, I’m very happy with the robot. After making the necessary adjustments before switching it on, and getting wires and things out of the way, it’s very reliable – even though I mentioned several times that I found it stuck or whatever, it works more than 9 times out of 10. It encourages me to tidy up every day, and saves me from vacuuming all the time. It does an excellent job of cleaning dust and hair and my carpets are visibly cleaner and the house is less dusty. For the price, you can’t go wrong. It’s an excellent budget robot vacuum!